It is desired that buildings having multiple similar rooms, hotels, multi-tenant dwellings, office buildings and hospitals for example, provide convenient data and power connections for one or more network and electrical devices. The rooms tend to be similar in purpose and typically include similar network and electrical devices. For example, all hotel rooms have occupant-controlled lights, a heating/air conditioning system (controlled by a thermostat) and a television. Certain of these rooms may include a data port for connection to a computer or another information processing or network device.
Although room guests (patients, occupants, etc) control the various room devices as desired, when the occupant leaves the room the ability to control in-room devices is lost. Controllers are available for controlling certain devices within each room, but control is typically based on time-of-day and cannot be optimized according to external factors, such as outside temperature or whether the occupant has left the room.
Most hotels and hospitals have a private branch exchange (PBX) that connects all wire-based telephones within the building(s), while most large buildings and complexes have a unified phone infrastructure. The PBX can provide certain telephone control features within the building, such as call transfer and call forwarding. In describing and demonstrating the invention below, a PBX device in the POTS infrastructure is assumed, however, in another embodiment of the invention the private branch exchange functionality comprise a subsystem that can coexist with the system of the invention. The infrastructure may be operating a PBX, or public phone system or no voice communication at all, as presented below where the voice communication is implemented via a Voice-over-IP technique.
Conductors, often copper wires, are distributed from a central location throughout a facility and are most often terminated at a connector in a face plate, nominally, in each room of the building. A handset is connected to the connector. Terminal blocks or telephone blocks for connecting the conductors are interposed between the PBX switch and the connector. In many installations the final “leg” of the infrastructure is completed with a Cat 3 (POTS grade wiring); Cat 5, Cat 5e, or Cat 6 (data network grade wiring). For clarity, all descriptions herein will reference Cat 3, a three pair (six wire) cable as the wiring utilized for the final leg of the POTS infrastructure.
FIG. 1 illustrates the aforementioned legacy POTS system 8, including a PBX switch 10 connected to terminal blocks 14 with a cable 16 (e.g., 50, 100 or 400 conductor pairs (voice pair conductors) within the cable 16). As can be seen, the terminal blocks 14 are configured in a branching pattern from the PBX switch 10. Face plates 20 support an associated connector 22 that is connected to final terminal blocks 14 with a Cat 3 conductor 23. Each face plate 20 and its associated telephone connector 22 is located in a different room of the building, e.g., hotel. Depending on the installation, there may be any number of terminal blocks 14 between the PBX switch 10 and the connectors 22.
A group of rooms, for example, each floor of an existing building, has a telephone room that aggregates the wiring to face plates 20 within a given area, in this example each floor. All telephone room connections are in turn aggregated, ultimately into a logical, if not physical, single building telephone room. Physical attributes of a location, e.g., multiple buildings, floors, meetings spaces, general locale, drive the design and layout of the wiring, the connectivity of voice pair conductors and spare conductor provisioning. Over time, these structured solutions have become more complex as the result of long (typically non-engineered) maintenance, technology upgrades and sometimes even a system redesign.
The present invention overcomes problems and limitations inherent with the current systems for delivering phone and data services to an individual room, such as a hotel room and for controlling electrical devices and system components within the room. The present invention provides expanded features and delivers phone service, data service and controllable power to each individual room.